Stanford professor reveals influence of German philosophers on current ideas of sex and marriage

June 27, 2012
By Corrie Goldman

For their time, the German philosophers' ideas and theories about romance and marriage were 'strange in the extreme,' Assistant Professor Adrian Daub said. Credit: The Art Renewal Center

(Phys.org) -- The gay marriage debate has turned one of the most intimate human relationships into one of the most publicly discussed topics. Everyone from judges and religious leaders to voters are expected to form an opinion about whether two adults should be allowed to enter into a same-sex union.

In the late 1800's a group of prominent philosophers also debated the autonomous status of marriage, but with a very different agenda.

The poets and thinkers of the German Idealist and Romantic movements "insisted that marriage was something beyond a contract, beyond a state institution, and beyond a civic or civil concern," said Adrian Daub, assistant professor of German Studies at Stanford.

At the same time, the German Romantics asserted that whatever in marriage was beyond these outside determinants was not religious in nature.

"It had to do with affect, it had to do with autonomy and its surrender, and it had to do with a special kind of fellowship," Daub added.

In today's gay marriage debate, "civil unions" are associated with gay relationships being somehow "everybody's business" said Daub. The Romantics, Daub noted, were more interested in "relationships that derived their justification entirely from themselves, rather than depending on licensing or legitimization from the outside."

Through an examination of the lives and works of philosophical luminaries such as G.W.F Hegel, J.G. Fichte, Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Daub found what he described as the "first group of people to think of marriage in an exclusively secular fashion."

By rejecting the easy answers provided by biology and theology, their theories set them apart from the previous two centuries of thought about marriage.

Although Daub initially "just liked the pun," 'Uncivil Unions' came to represent the larger themes of his research.

What was unique about these philosophic theories is that they saw marriages as "unions that happen without reference  or reverence  to the wider community," Daub said. And ironically, it is that autonomy, unmanaged by political authority, that Daub said "serves to make them important to the wider community."

By willingly submitting to one another's desires, the philosophers reasoned that a marital union is a voluntary surrender of autonomy.

At the same time, the Romantics thought that autonomy was simply transferred to the larger unit, the couple. So, as Daub outlined, a similarly agreed upon partnership could "prevent the alienation that usually ensues when we commit ourselves to structures larger than ourselves, for example having a job, joining the military, signing a mortgage."

As innocuous as some of their theories may seem now, Daub described the works of the philosophers, poets and novelists who wrote about romance and marriage as "strange in the extreme." Prominent for their work in other fields, their treatises on relationships were particularly daring because the airing of such risqué matters was unheard of in their time.

Fichte graphically worried that by having intercourse women would lose their dignity in an appendix to his "Foundations of Natural Right" (1796). Schlegel and Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) devoted much of their writing to philosophical considerations of sex and marriage that drew heavily on their own autobiographies. Schlegel wrote about an adulterous affair, Novalis about the loss of his teenage fiancee.

Until now, academic documentation of the intellectual contributions from this fertile period of thought has generally neglected these theories of sex, marriage and their relationship to one another.

"A lot of scholarship on them is pretty much content to say that they're sexist and outdated  which they are, to be sure," said Daub. "But I wanted to show that they can be suggestive, interesting and surprisingly current."

The philosophers came to view the romantic and cooperative union of two people as a social relationship that could serve as a scalable model for harmonious political organization. Friedrich Schleiermacher, for example, envisioned a religious community as an enlarged family. Similarly, Novalis thought that political constitutions have to make room for a "sense of family" (meaning of the state as a huge family). And the young Hegel wondered how one could use love to bring modern states closer to a Greek polis.

It's no coincidence that a generation of philosophers began to reflect on the institution of marriage at about the same time.

Many of Germany's greatest minds were at their scholarly prime as the French Revolution raised questions about personal autonomy.

The Revolution was built on the concept that human affairs could be emancipated from tradition and "rethought with deference to human reason and affect rather than entrenched authority," said Daub.

Marriage, with its religious strictures and traditions going back centuries, became a prime locus for such rethinking by the Romantics and Idealists.

With the important caveat that the Romantics were restricted by what was acceptable in their day, Daub said there are contiguous themes between their ideas and the "free love" communities that the hippies espoused in the 1960's.

"The idea that human affection has a wisdom of its own that should not or cannot effectively be reigned in by considerations of common sense," said Daub, "is one that connects [the German city] of Jena 1796 to Haight Ashbury 1968."

Although the thinkers and poets that Daub studied certainly "made a splash" in their day, the immediate impact of their erotic philosophies was negligible. In the case of the Idealists, people focused on other aspects of their work; in the case of the Romantics, people didn't think they had a real philosophy behind their treatment of eroticism.

However, as Daub noted, their philosophies of sex and marriage, "from Kierkegaard, to Marx, to Nietzsche, to Freudian psychoanalysis and fin-de-siècle sexology drew on them" and through these intermediaries, "their theories arguably shaped our modern view of sexuality more than any other group of thinkers."

Related Stories

A new study, published in the Journal of Marriage and Family reveals that married couples experience few advantages for psychological well-being, health, or social ties compared to unmarried couples who live together. While ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- A University of Kansas political scientist who has researched gay and lesbian political movements in the United States says states statutory bans on same-sex marriages may have helped shift public empathy ...

New research from North Carolina State University shows that gay and lesbian couples are forming long-term, committed relationships, even in the absence of the right to marry. However, couples surveyed for the study overwhelmingly ...

Legal rights and protections play second fiddle to the power of love for younger gay and lesbian couples who have formed civil partnerships, according to a three-year study by researchers at The University of Manchester.

(PhysOrg.com) -- According to a comprehensive new analysis of public opinion surveys conducted over the last 15 years, support for the legalization of same-sex marriage has grown substantially in the United States. Among ...

Since 2008, MIT economist Tavneet Suri has studied the financial and social impacts of Kenyan mobile-money services, which allow users to store and exchange monetary values via mobile phone. Her work has shown that these ...

Researchers have discovered a dinosaur tail complete with its feathers trapped in a piece of amber. The finding reported in Current Biology on December 8 helps to fill in details of the dinosaurs' feather structure and evolution, ...

Reporting new research results involves detailed descriptions of methods and materials used in an experiment. But when a study uses computers to analyze data, create models or simulate things that can't be tested in a lab, ...

Nothing ruins a potentially fun event like putting it on your calendar. In a series of studies, researchers found that scheduling a leisure activity like seeing a movie or taking a coffee break led people to anticipate less ...

(Phys.org)—Douglas Petrovich, an archaeologist with Ontario's Wilfrid-Laurier University in Canada has sparked controversy in the ancient history scholarly community by making claims that he has found proof that Hebrew ...

6 comments

At the same time, the German Romantics asserted that whatever in marriage was beyond these outside determinants was not religious in nature.

Yes because they were assuming the role of religions in promoting it. Philo propagandists were preparing the euro intelligencia for the next round of wars by convincing them they had the right to fill up the earth with all haste and judicious intent. Instead of using god they were deifying the intellect, in order to justify this.

Nietzsche, schopenhauer, fichte, hegel and the rest had nothing useful to say beyond the catchphrases they coined (man and superman), good for reminding euros that they were indeed the chosen people still. Their blather was intentionally obtuse in order to disguise its lack of real substance.

Academes could confidently claim to understand it, and nobody could prove them wrong could they? Not even another philo. An old trick - theologians had been using it for a few millenia.

or Schopenhauer never married and they ended their lives as a bitter misogynists..

Schopenhauer is mentioned nowhere in this.

(man and superman), good for reminding euros that they were indeed the chosen people still.

I think you should read Nietsche...not the rewrite his sister did for the Nazis. His idea of an Übermensch has nothing to do with supremacy or domination of others. It is simply a term used for someone striving to be more/better than he/she currently is.

His idea of an bermensch has nothing to do with supremacy or domination of others.

Yeah well who KNOWS what his ideas really were? His philosophy was as obtuse as any of them. Was he a nihilist or not? The point is, his catchphrases WERE so easily adaptable to supremacy and domination and THEY were the ideas which had the greatest effect. And I do not think this was merely chance.

These philos were all propagandists for social classes immune to other forms, as they always have been, with pragmatic social messages ensconced in indecipherable pretense. They were painting a very real picture of euro supremacy which directly enabled manifest destiny, the african land grab, and the rise of national socialism.

You could have put "der Wille zur Macht" on das Heer belt buckles. Oh i suppose gott mit Uns was good enough. "und Heute de ganze Welt." Philosophy is best sung.

Please sign in to add a comment.
Registration is free, and takes less than a minute.
Read more

Click here to reset your password.
Sign in to get notified via email when new comments are made.